Week 11 Newsletter: November 27- December 1

Hello and welcome back! We had a great week back after Thanksgiving break and started our very eventful short session before the next holiday break! To start the week off, we recapped on the business fair and the Eagles got to share their lessons learned and things they feel most proud of. We also got to choose holiday buddies and the Eagles sent in their book wish list for the holiday book exchange. Here’s a look into the week!:

The navigator and launchpad studios have begun writing their Hero Stories! The Eagles were given lots of examples and advice on writing a great and powerful rough draft. Stories of “rags to riches” and stories highlighting heroic character traits. They are well on their way to writing a 750-word Hero Story highlighting their hero’s greatest struggles, his or her character traits that led to success (or failure) and the lessons learned.

This week in writing workshop for the foundation and navigator transition studios, the students studied mood and setting, and how to use powerful language to make a reader feel their writing, rather than simply describing. The second part of the week we practiced peer critiques, and the balance of warm and cool feedback. This pushed everyone to get comfortable giving and receiving critique and to get more comfortable as writers, both personally and as peers.

For weekly journaling, each studio got the opportunity to personally reflect with the assigned prompts. For the foundation and navigator transition studios, students answered the questions: “What was your favorite part of the business fair? What was your greatest lesson learned? What’s something you learned this year that you could apply to you business next year?” and got to reflect further during the debrief at the start of the week. Meanwhile the navigator and launchpad studios were given the prompt: “At the holidays, we often talk about traditions- specifically family traditions.What is the point of traditions? Why, as humans, do we do them/hold them as important? How do you feel about traditions?”

For history this session, we are taking it back to ancient times for the foundation and navigator transition studios. This week we read Story of the World: Ancient Times. The students studied the fertile crescent and the very first hunter-gatherer tribes. They put themselves in the shoes of a young woman named Tarak who lived as a nomad. They were asked how they would feel; what they would like and dislike about their lives, what it would be like to have a family, and what it would have been like to see water for the first time.

In history for the navigator and launchpad studios, they learned about George Washington and his relationship with Alexander Hamilton. We talked about Washington’s strengths and weaknesses and how Hamilton complimented these.

Each studio has been creating personal reflection projects in the form of passion projects and SOLES. The younger studios have created personal projects to dedicate to their passions each week, while the older studios have built SOLES- which are maps of Self Organized Learning Environments built to help reach their goals and fulfill their passions.

Our art elective for this session is improv! We had our improv teacher, Russ, come in this week and introduce everyone to some improv exercises. The goal is to get everyone comfortable with being themselves, having fun, and thinking fast on their feet. Each week we hope improv can serve as an energizer and a break from “the grind” where the Eagles can express themselves and learn more about themselves and their fellow travelers.

We finished the week with a field trip to the movie theater to see Wonder! And what an inspiring film it was. For those who have read the book, it was a great experience to see the film adaptation. And for those of us who haven’t, it was such an inspirational and uplifting story to experience.

We are so excited for the rest of this session, with lots of holiday festivities and the exhibition of learning to look forward too!